AuthorTopic: Car chase enhancements (Read 2793 times)

1) Passenger/cargo limits. - If your vehicle is overloaded with loot and you get in an extended chase, it would have a chance of coming loose and falling out onto the road. - Take a cheap motor bike out for a solo mission, and you'll be able to weave through a traffic jam to escape the cops, but you'll be alone. - Take the sports car for a quick escape with a small squad after training skills around a site. - Take a stolen cube van and bring home a mountain of loot.

2) Drivers have to choose between attacking and driving. - Focus on driving and try to escape. - Fire a pistol at the enemy, but suffer a driving penalty on the next roll. - Try to ram the enemy off the road. - Hold it steady and give your passengers an attack bonus.

3) Site-specific suspicion modifier - Parking your sports car in the slums would draw extra attention even before you enter. Stay too long and it might be stolen by the time you leave. - Parking your jalopy at the upscale condos would be noticed and make the conservatives suspicious quicker. - Parking your stolen police car at the police station would not raise any eyebrows, but would be suspicious elsewhere.

4) Fragment the "driving bonus" into acceleration/topspeed/handling/protection/durability. - More niches for the vehicles to fill, making more useful types. Collecting a garage full would be useful. -- An armored van would keep you safe during slow moving shootouts. -- The sports car would provide a fast getaway, but not block any bullets. -- A standard car would be simpler to repair afterwards and blend in easier. - More detailed tracking of how close you are to escaping from your pursuers would be available, and the distance could modify weapon accuracy.

5) Choice of where to head during your escape. - Highway benefits fast vehicles with long stretches of road. - Suburbs benefit high acceleration vehicles with short open roads. - Downtown benefits maneuverable vehicles with thick traffic and narrow alleys.

6) Vehicle damage. - What's more suspicious than a stolen car? A car with a bunch of bullet holes in it! - If the industrial district has an auto plant, why pay for parts in addition to labor? (think tailoring vs garment factory) - Do you risk a heavy repair bill on the sports car or take the tough old jalopy? Or do you just dispose of the wreck and liberate a new one?

7) Manual vs Automatic - Manual car gets a skill roll during acceleration for a speed boost when changing gears. Low skill drivers can fail to shift and lose speed, or even damage the car.

8) Harassment while travelling to a site. - Driving skill and street sense rolled against car suspiciousness and heat to see if you encounter trouble on the way out. - Poor driving skill or light damage could result in a fine, stolen or damaged cars could result in alarmed conservatives and a preemptive car chase.

1 and 6 are nice2 seems like over complicated. In short time we will figure wich option is better and just use that5 also sounds too muchIm not sure about 7. Maybe bad drivers should make mistakes with no need of adding more car types8 should be affected by police regulation laws. Like in C+ they just randomly stop you and in L+ they just wave you because they are afraid of losing their job

I'm thinking of if we're adding in vehicle damage, why not add in vehicle enhancements? It doesn't have to be outrageous like a batmobile, but maybe just things such as armoured cars, bulletproof windows, etc. To make it balanced, perhaps police cars can be upgraded at C+ laws, while be lightly upgraded at L+. Also, if you own the Auto Plant what stops you from upgrading your own cars?

Heh... if it were as easy to implement ideas like this as it were to think of them, and all the ideas for improvements for the game on this forum had been implemented, then... well... then Liberal Crime Squad would be the most awesome game ever made after all those improvements... heh. Anyway... kind of a long list of stuff... I guess if I REALLY wanted to I could probably implement all the things on that list but I'm not even sure if I agree with all of them... let's see...

1) Traditionally in many video games, players can carry around massive amounts of stuff with no difficulty. A good example is an SNES RPG like Final Fantasy 4, 5, or 6, or Chrono Trigger... 1 person or a small group can carry a truly massive inventory of items around, including 99 each of many different types of armors and weapons. This is ridiculous of course, but it's good to have some aspects of the game that work like a video game and not like real life, so people playing it can be like, hey, this is a video game, it's not real life, and then this prevents them from going out and doing stuff they do in the game. Then again some games like the Diablo series and Fallout series and one of my favorite games, Arcanum, put more realistic limits on how much stuff you can carry at once (kinda absurd calling it "realistic" though seeing as most of those games involve either magic or some other unrealistic stuff).

2) Actually in the current game isn't attacking a different option than driving? In attacking you shoot at the other people, while in driving you try and drive fast to outrun and get away from them, in the current game. At least I think so. And ramming someone off the road, that sounds like a nice gameplay aspect (in fact I fondly remember a car-racing video game called Megarace where this was done), but in this game your car is ahead of the other cars and they are chasing you. They could ram YOU from behind but there isn't any way you could ram them since you're in front.

3) Gah, getting my car stolen at a site? That would suck! I don't want that to happen when I play the game! And if cars make people suspicious why not just go places on foot to avoid that suspicion? Yes there are a few benefits to having cars, like being able to go to outskirts or a different city and having an easier time with kidnapping, but I find it easier to escape on foot then in a car. If we handicap cars too much then people might just play the game without getting cars and go around on foot.

4) Good idea but a little complicated to implemented. Still, good idea. Yes, it is good.

5) If you hit a site downtown and are being chased, you'll still be downtown for awhile before you can get to a highway or suburbs. Yeah you can decide where you want to drive in the long run but it might take like 15 minutes to get to that part of town and in the meantime people are shooting at you. Not so sure about this... in a high-speed car chase you don't always have that many options, I mean how many times have you seen a movie where a car going at a high speed in a chase jumps from 1 side of a drawbridge to another when the 2 sides aren't connected, across a gap? For me, I've seen that a ton of times.

6) Vehicle damage? Sheesh, we already have armor damage and now there's vehicle damage, soon there'll be weapon damage... durability for items... then you'll need to take them to the blacksmith for repairs... ugh that kind stuff is one of the gameplay aspects of certain other games that I really dislike the most. When stuff has durability and gets damaged and you need to leave the battle and go back to town to get the blacksmith or whoever to fix it up again for some money. If you've played Diablo 2, for instance, this is the biggest annoyance in that game. I kinda think we ought to make the game experience as fun as possible and if something is annoying and not fun then... not something to do. Just think if you get your vehicle shot up every time you go out to a site and then need to get it fixed up the next day how much in-game time and money that'd waste... people would stop using cars... again it seems a lot of these changes would make players liable to opt out of using cars when they go on raids and choose to go by foot instead... unless we also bork going on foot by, fer instance, allowing people to chase you in cars while you're on foot, or limiting how much you can carry while running on foot to almost nothing, or stuff like that.

7) Sheesh, it's already terrible enough for low skill drivers, they usually end up dead anyway. This would kill them even deader than dead. Plus it seems automatic transmission would work like cars in the game currently do, while manual would have a bunch of downsides and no upsides. That isn't even realistic... in real life a highly skilled driver can go faster on manual than automatic but you'd just have it be a skill roll to see if the manual can be as good as the automatic.

Hah even more stuff to discourage people from using cars in this game...

OK, OK, I don't mean to be so critical, they are good ideas! I just think, wow, if we are going to do things like this, which affect the game balance between going on car and on foot so that on foot is a much better option than going in a car, in an effort to make going in cars more interesting, well, we need to balance that out somehow! Ah I remember you did mention stuff like bulletproof glass or an armored van. But if it's bulletproof, like totally bulletproof, that means they can't kill you AT ALL. Well that would also be an imbalance too. I guess if you combine that with car damage, then maybe enough damage and then the bulletproof glass or armored car stops protecting you? Hmm I suppose maybe this could be balanced. You'd also want to change the code for foot chases too though, keep it balanced... if you are limited in how much stuff you can carry on a vehicle you'd be even more limited how much you can carry in a foot chase. Then again, how did you manage to carry so much stuff in the FIRST PLACE anyway, back when you were walking around a site in site mode, on foot... how did you manage to acquire so many items that their added weight is many times more than what a human being, or even 6 people, could possibly carry, and do this while also being able to wear disguises, go around stealthily, fight people without restrictions on movement, etc.? Really if we wanted restrictions on how much people can carry at once to be realistic that'd have to apply to site mode too! Some of these changes would imply changes elsewhere in the game, you see, or otherwise the game would be rather illogical. It's illogical people could carry a HUGE amount of stuff on foot but suddenly be limited how much they can carry while in a car. These ARE good ideas but if we implemented them it would probably mean implementing changes to foot chases and site mode just to keep things logical and balanced and have the way the game-world works be internally consistent. What I am saying is, if we want to have a limit on how much you can carry in a car, we should also have a limit on how much you can carry on foot... and probably base it on strength... and then have each item have a weight in pounds and then then have a maximum number of pounds each person can carry based on their strength. Pounds instead of kilograms because the game takes place in the United States... although using the metric system would be more Liberal... maybe kilograms and other metric units would be better in a Liberal game like this, using imperial units like pounds, inches, quarts, degrees Fahrenheit, etc. is Conservative, the Liberal way is to use kilograms, centimeters, liters, degrees Celsius, etc.

A general point to start:I'm not just throwing these ideas out and expecting someone else to do the work.I've got the code checked out on my system and compiling, I've done a few smaller things already, and I am planning to do this work myself.From what I've seen of the code, these are items I believe I can accomplish without excessive effort. (Still lots of work tho!)

Beyond that, the feedback, gameplay opinions and side effect concerns are appreciated.

1 ) At the moment, LCS swings to both extremes. You can't carry *any* extra equipment with you on missions, but you can drag home infinite amounts of loot.Eg: Having a spare armored vest and rifle in your backpack when you're going to the jail to break your leader out would be a huge advantage, but you can't do that unless you have an expendable minion carry the vest on his chest.Also, in relation to #6, carrying extra loot should probably provide penalties to escape on foot, mitigated by strength. Strength is a vastly underutilized attribute IMO, so it would be good to need some muscle golems to haul loot for your rifle wizards Cars would make the weight of the loot immaterial to your escape chances, although you might lose some if its overflowing the trunk.

I'm thinking that on-site, if you start going over your carry limits, then agility stats would turn red and start dropping until you drop things or leave.

2 ) Seth: It would probably be fairly straightforward to determine the one or two best choices in a particular situation and highlight them for the user. Still, you might want to pass up the optimal choice in a certain situation if you're trying to run without racking up crimes, or if you're playing an excessively violent style. Or if you're just trying to be consistent with your past actions.

This would be an option for the driver alone. Passengers (if any) could independently attack or take cover while the driver tries to escape or attack.Trying to ram an enemy car would, of course make you lose your entire lead relative to the first enemy car. If your vehicle is too slow to escape straight up and the RNG isn't giving you useful random events, it could be worth while.Also, the ramming wouldn't be demolition derby style ramming unless you're very low skill and don't know what you're doing. It would be more of a PIT attempt, or shoving the car to the side to make the enemy clip a light pole or a parked car or ramp off some construction materials.

3 ) I was thinking it would only happen if your car is drastically out of place. A sports car in the slums getting jacked, or a barely running jalopy at the CEO castle getting towed away. Given that you probably got your car by stealing it from someone else while they were shopping, having someone steal it back while you're looting is only fair Perhaps you could have the driver stay behind to keep the engine running, ensure a faster getaway and incidentally keep the car safe.There are certainly issues to handle with the side effects of losing your car, such as how your crew get home from the outskirts. It certainly shouldn't be common, and its not a very high priority for me in any case.

4 ) The fragmentation of stats isn't too complicated IMO, and really forms the basis of a lot of the rest of it.Without separate stats, you're just left with the "arbitrary +X car" for X=0 to 3.

5 ) That's a very good point.Maybe your choice of downtown/suburbs/highway is determined by the site you attack, and you just need to use a car appropriate to the area.Bridge jumps are TOTALLY going to be a thing I'm thinking, successful roll = instant clear of pursuit. Marginal roll = crew makes it but car is wrecked on the landing (clip the edge and lose the wheels, or just land hard enough to smash the suspension out) and they have to walk the rest of the way home. Failed roll puts you in the drink, losing the car, the loot, and those who survive the crash are captured.

6 ) I suppose if you're doing a violent run and massacre conservatives all the time, you'd get an excessive number of car chases when you finally leave. My games recently haven't featured many car chases at all, though I leave before conservative reinforcements arrive.Also, if you're doing a violent run anyways, there's not as much need to use a pristine car. Conservatives might be suspicious when the bullet riddled car pulls up, but that's nothing compared to when automatic weapons fire erupts 10 seconds later

7 ) It looks like everybody misread me on this one.Standard cars get a speed *boost*, unless the driver is low skill and messes it up. Automatic means no messing up, but also no bonus.

8 ) Conservative Police harassment should probably also be a thing when you're walking to a site. How does your crew manage to walk all the way to the police station in heavy armor, toting machine guns anyways?

An armored van would be terribly difficult to acquire, but if you do get one, you're going to be on violence easy street for a while. It wouldn't be able to escape well, but you'd be well protected.At least when you're not shooting back. If you have the passengers take cover, they'd be fine until the vehicle gets worn down and you have to bail. If you're shooting back, then you must be at least somewhat exposed. Its a balance issue in the end.

Vehicle/squad capacity is interesting. Might be grounds to expand the car list, too. (I buy my cars--Vans mostly, fit the whole squad and their gear--and take 'em in Green. Stealing someone's car might well deprive a Liberal or Moderate of a substantial asset and possibly cost them their job, custody, etc!)

Stunt driving, not so sure. Car chases are already high risk. (If you opt to Escape!, you make the evasion roll, and if it fails shots get fired. I'd like to be able to order my folks to keep heads down and NOT shoot back: charges!)

"Jalopy" needs to be a type of car--the word's too fun not to use. It's not always clear whether you've got an old or a New VW Bug.

Car out/place sounds interesting, but (again) that needs to be made clear. (Paintjobs, too. If I paint a lawncare logo on my van, it ought to be able to fit into the 1% subdivision.)

7) Manual vs Automatic - Manual car gets a skill roll during acceleration for a speed boost when changing gears. Low skill drivers can fail to shift and lose speed, or even damage the car.

Isn't that like driving skill level one? i mean theres nothing hard about it once to get used to it.

As somebody who failed all his driving exams due to gear shifting, I can tell you that you're absolutely wrong about this.

It's more complex than that. I drive - and always have driven - a manual-transmission vehicle, and I think of gear shifts as easy, but for someone who's learned on a different car it can be significantly harder. I don't even necessarily mean someone who learned on an automatic trying to drive a manual (although that's probably the most extreme case); even a manual-transmission driver who's still getting used to a new car can have trouble (gear ratios are different, so you have to change at different times, not to mention that neither the number of gears nor how they're laid out is variable. Admittedly the most common layout variation is the positioning of reverse, which is hardly relevant to LCS, but still...).

The thing is, though, that a) someone who's learned on an automatic transmission has the RL equivalent of a hefty penalty when they try to drive a manual, b) being able to drive one manual proficiently doesn't necessarily mean you don't have to spend time getting used to another, and c) both of these effects would require fragmenting the driving stat - not just the rolls, but the actual stat - as well as keeping track of more things or handwaving away that driving an automatic for a long time makes you able to pick up a manual flawlessly on your first go. The way the game is at the moment, we don't care about the transmission, so we effectively get the suspension of disbelief on that for free.

ETA: and yes, this post changed who it was addressed to partway through. So send a squad of Liberals to raid my house.

It seems to me that the differences between manual cars could be easily handwaved away, same as the differences between guns.

The training on autos making you good at a manual perhaps not so much, because there are certainly a lot of people out there with automagic transmissions that fear manuals. And fragmenting the skill would definitely be bad.

Perhaps a more generic, minimum skill level in the car definition? Or just having negative skill bonuses on the better cars?From basic cars, to hot rods to the solid-gold rocket-car each requiring more skill to drive competently.IE: When tooling around in a jalopy, its easy to stay out of trouble even if you have bad lane placement, turn too hard and don't look where you're going.In a top end sports car, you have to have some decent driving skill to avoid flipping it or spinning out, or just running into something ahead you didn't see in time.

5) Vehicle power stats added. There is a separate bonus for driving, dodging and shooting. Shooting has a separate bonus/penalty for drivers vs passengers. EG: Van drivers suffer -3 for bad line of sight and driving distractions, but the van passengers get bonuses. Driving & dodging have a base bonus for easy cars, and two limits for the best that a skilled driver can get out of the car and how hard it is to get there.

Eg: Clueless drivers can use a Bug quite decently since it has a base escape value of 4 for an unskilled mutant. However the max it can provide is 9 (requiring skill 6 + AGL 6 to reach) The sports car by comparison has a base value of 0 for the unskilled mutant, but the skill 6 AGL6 person will get a total of 9, and skill 10 AGL10 gets 15.

I'm still considering the balance, and making a spreadsheet to find what looks good.